EmpiRE-Compass: A Neuro-Symbolic Dashboard for Sustainable and Dynamic Knowledge Exploration, Synthesis, and Reuse

Abstract: Software engineering (SE) and requirements engineering (RE) face a significant increase in secondary studies, particularly literature reviews (LRs), due to the ever-growing number of scientific publications. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) exacerbates this trend by producing LRs rapidly but often at the expense of quality, rigor, and transparency. At the same time, secondary studies often fail to share underlying data and artifacts, limiting replication and reuse. This paper introduces EmpiRE-Compass, a neuro-symbolic dashboard designed to lower barriers for accessing, replicating, and reusing LR data. Its overarching goal is to demonstrate how LRs can become more sustainable by semantically structuring their underlying data in research knowledge graphs (RKGs) and by leveraging LLMs for easy and dynamic access, replication, and reuse. Building on two RE use cases, we developed EmpiRE-Compass with a modular system design and workflows for curated and custom competency questions. The dashboard is freely available online, accompanied by a demonstration video. To manage operational costs, a limit of 25 requests per IP address per day applies to the default LLM (GPT-4o mini). All source code and documentation are released as an open-source project to foster reuse, adoption, and extension. EmpiRE-Compass provides three core capabilities: (1) Exploratory visual analytics for curated competency questions; (2) Neuro-symbolic synthesis for custom competency questions; and (3) Reusable knowledge with all queries, analyses, and results openly available. By unifying RKGs and LLMs in a neuro-symbolic dashboard, EmpiRE-Compass advances sustainable LRs in RE, SE, and beyond. It lowers technical barriers, fosters transparency and reproducibility, and enables collaborative, continuously updated, and reusable LRs